ohmidog!

Eicher

An Amish man who shot a mother dog and her eight puppies told police in New York that he thought killing dogs was acceptable under his culture, as long as it was done out of sight and with discretion – or as he put it, “Shoot, shovel and shut up.”

“In the Amish it’s acceptable to put dogs down. I thought as long as you did it out back it was okay,” Jonathon Eicher reportedly told officers who arrested him and the breeder of the dogs in Wayne County.

The nine dead dogs were discovered in a ditch by a highway crew on January 17.

Also charged with animal cruely was Merlin Schmucker, 26, who owned and bred the Australian red heelers, but was unable to sell the dogs because, he said, they’d become too big.

Schmucker

Schmucker asked Eicher, his employee, to put the dogs down, said Wayne County District Attorney Rick Healy.

“This is simply a case of animal cruelty,” he said. “They can’t treat the animals the way they want to treat the animals; they must treat the animals humanely.”

Both Schmucker and Eicher were charged with nine counts of cruelty to animals , WHAM reported.

Schmucker told police he had “raised the dogs and couldn’t put them down myself so I asked Jonathan to do it.”

Eicher admitted killing the dogs with a .22-caliber rifle, police said.

A German man on the run from police was arrested after his Jack Russell terrier gave away his hiding place, authorities said on Monday.

When police called at the 52-year-old man’s home near Cologne in western Germany on Friday, an acquaintance answered, holding the suspect’s dog.

“The man claimed not to know where the wanted man was. When he put the dog down, it proceeded with a wagging tail to a small cupboard… and stood expectantly in front of it,” police said.

Officers opened the door of the small cupboard and found the man they were seeking ”hunched up inside,” according to AFP.

A police spokesman was not able to say what the man was wanted for, but that it was “not a capital crime.” He declined to give the man’s name,or that of his tell-tale dog.

Among all the things dogs’ noses are sniffing out to make the world a better and safer place — drugs, explosives, missing children, fleeing felons, diseases, bedbugs, pirated cds, sewage leaks, cell phones in prisons — here’s one I hadn’t heard of:

Mold.

A Princeton, New Jersey, company is using canines to detect potentially lethal mold in homes, offices and classrooms.

1-800-GOT-MOLD?  calls itself America’s leading mold inspection company, and claims to be the nation’s first franchise operation to recruit man’s best friend to pinpoint the location of hidden mold in buildings, preventing potential health dangers, which include fatigue, headaches, respiratory problems, and even cancer.

Mold Dogs (and the term has been trademarked) can locate the source of hidden mold growth, even in its early stages.

The company’s founder, Jason Earle, realized that  traditional mold-detection involved a lot of guesswork. While air sampling is commonly used to detect household molds, it often fails to locate the precise source of the problem.

 Mold Dogs save time and money and allow the company to avoid unnecessary invasive procedures, according to Earle, who suffered from mold-related health complications as a child.

Earle’s dog Oreo is the first mold detection dog in the northeast and one of the first nationwide, he says.

(Photo: Oreo, courtesy of 1-800-GOT-MOLD? )

The Humane Society of the United States says a 9-month undercover investigation has revealed routinely unlawful mistreatment of hundreds of chimpanzees and other primates in a federally funded research project at the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana.

As a result, HSUS has forwarded a 108-page complaint to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, alleging at least 338 possible violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act at the center. The law sets minimal standards for the treatment of animals in labs.

The HSUS covertly videotaped the lab, gathering evidence of severe distress of primates in isolation, including self-mutilation — tearing gaping wounds into their arms and legs in what the HSUS says could be a result of the center’s failure to provide adequate environmental enhancement.

In addition, the report says, dart guns and squeeze cages are shown causing acute psychological distress to chimpanzees and monkeys.

“These experiments come at an enormous short-term and long-term expense to taxpayers, and an even greater expense in suffering and anguish to chimpanzees and other primates forced to live in this pitiful laboratory,” said Wayne Pacelle, HSUS president and CEO.

“Our investigation found an abject failure on NIRC’s part to attend to the psychological well-being of primates as dictated by law, a lax USDA attitude about enforcing that law, and a knowing and gross violation of the federal government’s pledge to stop breeding more chimpanzees for research.”

The center cages about 6,000 monkeys and 325 chimpanzees on its 100 acres, but in the span of nine months, an HSUS investigator saw only about 20 of the chimpanzees used in active studies. The majority of chimpanzees at the facility appeared to be warehoused or used for breeding – at a time of fiscal crisis and when no other developed nation uses chimpanzees in experiments.

The chimps in New Iberia are among more than 1,000 chimps kept in laboratories across the United States, HSUS says.

Part of the the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the New Iberia Research Center is located on a former naval base outside of New Iberia, Louisiana.